


Child of Hunger

by Mer_cute_io



Category: Cursed (TV 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bad medical practices, By that I mean I make a lot of stuff up, Canon-Typical Violence, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, I explore Fey theology, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Injury, M/M, Past Abuse, Rating May Change, Set after season one, Sickness, Slow Burn, almost certainly, because dark ages, unless I'm psychic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:41:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26023636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mer_cute_io/pseuds/Mer_cute_io
Summary: In which Gawain is lost until he is found, Lancelot discovers what it means to be himself, Squirrel is a badass knight who adopts them both, and Fey theology becomes incredibly important to all involved.
Relationships: Dof/Pym (Cursed), Gawain | The Green Knight & Squirrel | Percival (Cursed), Gawain | The Green Knight/The Weeping Monk | Lancelot (Cursed), Squirrel | Percival & The Weeping Monk | Lancelot (Cursed)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 104





	Child of Hunger

He was born into fire, as were all of his kin.

His mother had liked to tell the story of his birth. When she had gone into labor, the midwife stoked the flames of their family’s hearth into a roaring light. The flames pulsed with his mother’s cries, and when he slid into the world they’d extinguished with his first breath. The midwife had taken him into her arms, and as she always did, instead of placing him to his mother’s breast she had placed him in the pile of ash left in the hearth.

The spirits in the fire always blessed newborns with a prophecy, burned into their soft, new skin with the ash of their birth fire. His mother had been blessed with two ashy swirls at the corners of her mouth that looped down to her heart. “One for each of my babies,” she’d say after the birth of his younger brother, though his father would say the smile-like curves were for her relentless optimism.

His younger brother had a sunburst in the center of his forehead. His father had been thrilled. “He’ll be a genius,” he’d boast to anyone that would listen, but his mother would laugh and say, “No, it’s because he’s so joyful.”

His mother had loved to tell him how the ash had settled into the tear tracks that dragged down his cheeks. She had never been anything but proud, telling him that his baby tears had mingled with the ashen ones when she held him for the first time. “It means you’ll be my baby forever,” she’d like to tease.

He’d adored the story when he was younger, but the moment he was old enough to hear the other villagers gossip behind his back, he started to realize what his markings really meant. 

Bad luck. Grief. Pain.

“No one really knows what the Hidden have in store for us,” his mother had told him after he’d come to her, sobbing in childlike terror of his future. “You won’t know what your blessing might mean until the day you experience it. But they’re more than just a prophecy, Lancelot. The Hidden know you and love you from your first breath, and your markings connect you to them forever. No one can take them away from you.” 

She’d wiped the salty tears away, kissed the burned tear tracks that remained, then held his face firmly between her hands. “No matter what the Hidden have planned, you won’t be alone. You will have me, your father, and your brother. We will help you through _anything_.”

He’d believed her at the time.

The men in red robes invaded at night. It was winter in the Northern Kingdoms and the snow was falling thick, but the men upturned the braziers that rested outside every home and stoked the ceremonial fire pit until everything was ablaze.

One of them stabbed his father to death just as the smoke had woken them. His mother had been dragged away screaming and he’d tried to run into the woods with his younger brother, who was hardly older than a toddler. He’d almost made it when an arrow whistled past his shoulder and hit the center of the sunburst on his little brother’s forehead. His brother had dropped like a stone, and he froze in his tracks, unable to tear himself away. 

He sat there at the edge of the wood as fire whipped his village into an inferno. He’d thought another arrow was going to kill him too, but instead an old man in red robes sat with him as the village burned down.

Father Carden taught him many things that day. That was the first day he learned about hell, and that his mother had lied. His markings didn’t mean that the Hidden loved and protected him. He was alone, and hellfire had taken his family away.

That was _before_. He didn’t like to think about before. If he tried hard enough, he could forget that he had a family to miss. Those were good days, days that he could remember his mission with searing clarity and he didn’t quite feel the demons and shame crawling under his skin.

On bad days, burning and bloody days, he could hardly bear to exist. Father Carden cleansed him on those days.

He was born into fire. No matter how Father Carden tried to grant him salvation, he knew that he’d burn in death with his family. 

It shocked him then, now that he was close to death, that he only felt cold. 

The heat of his blood was drying sticky and cool in the night air and he shook with it. His hands trembled weakly in his lap, empty and blood slicked. His sword, he needed his sword. Didn’t he?

He swallowed convulsively; one of the Trinity Guard’s blows had broken something in his face and now blood oozed out his nose and down the back of his throat. He opened his mouth and he coughed raggedly, but the blood just coated his tongue with a coppery tang and he couldn’t figure out how to breathe through it. He curled inward and stopped coughing; it was easier not to. Pain sparked weakly over his body, but he couldn’t focus on it. His head was too foggy. 

Torchlight flickered over the bodies of the Trinity Guard around him, and he couldn’t tell if they were still convulsing in death or if it was just a trick of the light. One man’s golden mask had been knocked askew and his dead, white eye peered blankly around its edge. 

The man was dead by his hands, and he would have called him a brother only a few hours ago. 

He had not intended to kill them all. To abandon doctrine and rescue the Fey was to become an enemy of the church. To become an enemy of the church was to die, sooner or later. It was easier to let the Trinity Guard live, to let them kill him now rather than to face death at Father Carden’s hands. It was easier to stop fighting, to hold himself still and allow the Guard’s metal flails to wrap around his hands, forcing him to drop his blades.

The pain had been familiar at first, stinging and bruising across his back. Then the blows stoked that pain into a fury, and he’d bent and broke with it. It exploded hotly in his left shoulder and his arm fell limp to his side. Another wrenching blow had torn his legs out from under him, and he felt the left side of his face shatter underneath the spiked metal.

He’d expected to die then. Steel had pressed against his throat and he waited to feel its edge, to choke on his own blood for the last few seconds of his life.

He _hadn’t_ expected the Fey boy to come back, to shout his defiance with his young voice, to knock the guard and the steel away with a stone. The boy’s face had been bright with anger and courage as he stood his ground against warriors three times his size. 

All to save _his_ life. The Weeping Monk, assassin of the Fey. 

Abbot Wicklow had assumed the boy reminded the monk of himself, but that wasn’t true. The boy was brave and reckless in a way that he had never been. Fury and vengeance still burned hot in the boy’s eyes, and he had felt his own fade long ago. The monk hadn’t even thought that the boy might try and save his life. That kind of valor had become foreign to him.

No. If anything, the boy reminded him of the Green Knight. Impossible and courageous almost to absurdity, but filled with such purpose that the monk could not help but envy them.

His hands moved to defend the boy before he could even think to do it. He’d snatched his sword from the ground and carved through blood and meat and bone. He hadn’t stopped until the blood of the final guard coursed from his torn throat -- until there was no one left to crush that small bit of light that the boy still had but that the monk had lost.

Abbot Wicklow had stumbled away from him, his arrogance replaced with wide-eyed terror, and the monk felt his long buried fury crack and sharpen under his skin. Suddenly the blood on his hands felt _good_ . He raised his sword to Wicklow; he _wanted_ to cut down one more.

Wicklow fled, and the monk’s burst of strength vanished so quickly that his legs buckled beneath him.

For so long, he’d watched the Fey children scream and sob over their families. He’d watched his brothers kill them and burn them, and had been _grateful_ , because then he didn’t have to do it himself. Now he’d rather kill any of the Red Brothers, all of them, than stand silent and watch.

Perhaps that meant he needed to see Father Carden immediately. Perhaps he had finally succumbed to the demon in him, and he needed to be cleansed as he hadn’t since he was a child. 

It didn’t matter. He could not stand, not to fight with the paladins nor to fight against them. He could only sit in this pile of bodies, shuddering with the cold, and stare at a dead man’s glassy, white eye. He recognized himself in it. Another avenging sword, ready to blot out lives at a word. 

_Let me die then_ , he thought. The Green Knight had looked into the heart of him and called him guilty, and he’d felt the truth of it. Let him die rather than watch another village burn.

The ease of giving up shocked him. God would grant his forgiveness or he wouldn’t, but it was finally, _finally_ out of his hands. 

The tips of his fingers went numb and the world stopped making sense. Colors blurred and melted into each other. To his horror, the dead man’s eyelid twitched to a close, shuttering that wide, white eye. It blinked again, then again, over and over again, and each time the whiteness of it grew larger, bubbling outward until he couldn’t see anything but white. 

He didn’t realize that he’d passed out until small hands grabbed his shoulder and yanked him upward.

“Get up!”

The white hot agony of his shoulder woke him more than the words, and he would have cried out if he could find the breath. His shoulder felt like it had been stuffed with shattered glass, slicing into his flesh with every movement. He listed back towards the ground, but the hands pulled him back up sharply, grinding the glass deeper, carving streaks of pain down his arms and into his back.

“Please...stop,” he panted, unsure if he even spoke the words. He lifted his head weakly and he looked up. The Fey boy stared down at him, his face blurry through the monk’s dimmed vision. 

Irritation cut through the pain and the fog. _Run away, you fool_ , he thought but did not have the strength to say. _Your life is worth more than mine._

“Go,” he tried to say, but the word slurred in his mouth.

“Come on, you have to get up!” The boy shook him frantically, his fingers still clenched iron tight against his shoulder, and the pain of it burned through his thoughts like tinder. He reached up and pulled the boy’s hands away, cradling his shoulder defensively with his right hand.

“I can’t,” he said, nausea twisting in his stomach. He retched the blood out of his mouth as the boy hovered in front of him. 

Shame coursed through him at his own weakness. His death should have been swift and certain at the hands of the Trinity Guard. Instead he was hunched in on himself, shaking with pain and cold, because of a boy who would not leave him to die in peace. He wiped at his bloodied mouth with a trembling hand and pushed the boy weakly towards the woods.

“Go, damn you!” he rasped, blood and bile still dripping from his mouth. “No one will follow you.”

The boy shook his head and, thankfully, pulled at his uninjured shoulder this time. “Stop being so bloody stupid! You’ll be found if you stay here, now _come on_!”

He was pulled at with such insistence that finally, more from the hope that the boy would stop than anything else, he shakily tried to get to his feet. His knees trembled beneath him, and he would have fallen back to the ground if the boy didn’t wrap his arms around his waist. 

Nausea kicked at him furiously as the world tried to tilt first one way, then another, but he took a step. Then one more. Step by step, the boy dragged him forward until he nearly ran straight into Goliath. She nickered and nosed at the top of his head. In a daze, he fell against her side, pressing the uninjured side of his face against the fuzz of her neck.

The boy was saying something. He tried to listen. 

“...just wait here for me. I’m going to go back to find him.”

“Go back?” He shook his head, struggling to understand through the pounding in his temples. “You can’t--”

“I’ll be right back.” 

He snaked a hand out and snatched the boy’s wrist before he could run away. Anger sparked in the boy’s eyes, the same flashing anger that the monk had seen in him so many times before. “Let me go!” the boy snapped, yanking at his wrist.

He held on, though the jostling burned his ribs. “What are you doing? You can’t go back, it’s dangerous.”

“I can’t just abandon him!”

“Who?”

“The Green Knight,” the boy said as if it was obvious.

The title fell on the monk like a shock of ice water, and Percival twisted his hand out of the monk’s grip in his distraction. 

“He’s alive?”

“He has to be,” the boy said, his shoulders bunched up defensively. “I _won’t_ abandon him.” 

A thread of pity wound around the monk’s chest. That was the voice of a child that had already lost all he could bear to lose. He doubted the boy would believe the knight was dead even if it was shouted from the treetops, but that did not change the fact that the knight had been shaking with the effects of torture when the monk saw him last, blood dripping steadily down his chair, his skin mottled with bruises and brands. 

Prisoners did not leave Brother Salt’s kitchen alive. 

“He’s alive!” the boy protested as if he could hear the monk’s thoughts. “A soldier came to the tent where I was being held. One of Uther’s soldiers. He had orders from the king to take the Green Knight.”

That caught his attention. King Uther never cared much for the Fey, certainly not enough to go out of his way to rescue a half-dead Fey warrior. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I was alone in the torture cell when the soldier came, and he left as soon as he found out that he wasn’t there. The paladins had already moved him. But that soldier must have found him, wherever he was, and taken him to Uther’s camp. He _must_ be there.”

“It’s...possible,” he said hesitantly, though he still couldn’t imagine what the king would want with the Green Knight. Nothing good, he was sure.

“If you’re not going to help me, then let me go! I’ll save him by myself if I have to,” the boy said, raising his voice with outrage. 

“Shh!” the monk hushed, eyes darting up to make sure they were still alone. 

The boy crossed his arms and glared at him, promising trouble if the monk dared to suggest again that they abandon the Green Knight, but he could see no other option. They couldn’t possibly rescue him. It was too dangerous, too unlikely to succeed. The monk could hardly stand, much less carry another fully grown man out of camp while surrounded by enemies. He wouldn’t risk the boy’s life when the knight was almost certainly dead.

But...if the Green Knight had truly been taken from the paladin encampment by King Uther, then the boy could be right; the knight might still be alive. If he _was_ alive, then the monk owed him a debt, for he had kept the monk’s secret when he could have brought the wrath of the church upon his head. He had been the first person to show the monk compassion since his childhood. Since _before_. 

He shivered involuntarily as fear pricked at his skin. Father Carden was in King Uther’s encampment, cutting down all in his path to find the Wolf-Blood Witch. He...did not want to go there. He did not want to see the father again, not now that he realized that he could leave.

God, he did not want to lose this one scrap of courage that he had found deep within himself -- the courage that let him save _this_ Fey boy when he had watched his brothers kill and burn so many others -- but Father Carden’s words had always had power over him. If he saw the father again, God knows what he’d be forced to do.

The monk was a weapon, forged to hunt and kill the Fey. Father Carden would do everything in his power to keep him that way. It wasn’t worth the risk.

Then the boy glared at him with such righteous fury that the monk flinched with the burning force of it. “Gawain named me a Knight of the Fey because I’m not a bloody coward! I won’t leave him behind now! _I’m_ not afraid of the stupid Red Paladins. I’ll kill them all if they so much as look at me!”

Gawain. The name echoed in the monk’s head, unbidden. It was a strange thing to have the Green Knight named.

Exhaustion weighed the monk down, and he sighed. The risks didn’t matter; the boy would not be stopped, and he would die without the monk’s help. He did not work so hard to save the boy’s life just to let him die now.

Besides, whatever courage that he’d found within himself he owed to that damn knight and those words that he’d burned into the monk’s soul. 

_You burn their homes. You slay their mothers and their fathers, and you watch your red brothers run them down on horses. And you see it all through those weeping eyes. That makes you guilty._

“Get on the horse,” he said, pulling the boy towards Goliath. “We’ll make better time.”

The boy scrambled into Goliath’s saddle. “You’re going to help me?” he asked, staring suspiciously at the monk.

He clumsily dragged himself into the saddle with his one working arm, settling awkwardly behind the boy. “If he’s alive, then I’ll find him.”

The boy glanced back at him, as if deciding whether or not to trust him. “The same way you used to find us?”

“Yes.” 

The boy opened his mouth and drew in breath, surely to ask _how_ , exactly, the monk used to track the Fey. He pushed the reins into the boy’s hands before he could. “You’ll have to guide her; I can’t hold the reins with my shoulder like this. Lead her into the woods. If we’re going to Uther’s camp, then we can’t take the roads. They’ll see us coming from a mile away, and no one will be happy to see us.”

The boy did as he was told. “Are there lots of soldiers in the king’s camp?”

“Soldiers and paladins both.”

“Good,” the boy said. “I’ll fight them all.”

He felt the corners of his mouth tug upward despite himself. “You have spirit, kid. The Green Knight was right to knight you.” 

“I’m _not_ a kid,” the boy grumbled, but he lifted his chin and straightened his shoulders with dignity. It was obvious that the boy cared dearly for the Green Knight’s opinion of him. _And well he should_ , he thought. The monk had never faced a more worthy opponent in his life. 

Belatedly, the monk asked, “What is your name?” 

“Squirrel."

He cocked an eyebrow. “Is that the name you were given?”

“No, but I hate that name. It's boring," the boy said, scrunching up his face with distaste.

“That may be. But it's your name, and a knight is called by his true name.”

The boy rolled his eyes so hard that his entire head moved on his neck. “Ugh, fine. It’s Percival.”

The monk tightened his grip around the boy a little as Goliath stepped into the woods, and said, “I am glad to know you, Sir Percival."

Percival shrugged and muttered, “Yeah, whatever,” but the monk watched as the knightly honorific made him glow with pride. 

The monk smiled a little, then let his head bow low as pain tugged at him. His chest crackled underneath his broken ribs, and he coughed up a bit of bloody phlegm. He still couldn’t move his left arm with the pain in his shoulder, and the left side of his face was so swollen he couldn't bear to touch it. 

Still, he guided Goliath to near-certain death to protect a boy he hardly knew and to save the life of the knight he had tried to kill. 

All because he had forsaken God to save a Squirrel. 

**Author's Note:**

> I did not expect to fall in love with these characters, but after finishing the first season, this story burned in me so fiercely that I had to drop everything to write it. Gawain and Lancelot were just meant to be, and I'm obsessed. 
> 
> I've never written a long fic before, but I have this one all planned out and I know where I'm going, so I'm hoping for the best!
> 
> The show didn't give me enough backstory about Fey spirituality/theology, so I'm making up a lot. Let me know what you think <3


End file.
